Towards a Room with a View: A Personal Account of Contributions to Local Knowledge, Theory, and Research in Fieldwork and Comparative

Studies Author(s): Jack Goody Reviewed work(s): Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 20 (1991), pp. x+1-23 Published by: Annual Reviews Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155791 . Accessed: 23/10/2012 07:46
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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1991. 20:1-23 Copyright ? 1991 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

TOWARDS A ROOM WITH A VIEW: A Personal Account of Contributionsto Local Knowledge, Theory, and Research in Fieldwork and ComparativeStudies
Jack Goody
St. John's College, University of Cambridge,CambridgeCB2 ITP, United Kingdom
KEY WORDS: history, Cambridge, kinship, literacy, LoDagaa

When the editors asked me to make a personal contributionto the Annual Review of Anthropology, I accepted mainly because my colleagues, Fortes and Leach, had alreadydone so. I write here more to markourjoint achievement at what became the Departmentof Social Anthropologyat Cambridge, and to review my own particularcontribution,than to offer new insights or revelations about anthropologists. Fortes arrived in Cambridgein 1950 as Professor, I returnedthere as a graduatestudent at the end of the same year, and Leach came in 1954. Our relationshipswere never entirelyharmonious-what relationshipsare?But we collaboratedfrom the beginning in a way thatwas helpful to each other and to others.1 That collaborationbegan with seminarsevery Friday of term, which
'In her interestingpiece on Meyer Fortes in the AmericanEthologist, Susan Drucker-Brown (2) describes her introductionto Cambridgeand to the postgraduateseminar where Leach and Goody were always being rude to one another.That we arguedvigorously is true, but such was the intellectual culture to which we were accustomed. We saw this not as rudeness but as frankness. We generally saw eye to eye on the way the Departmentshould go, except that Fortes did not approve of the proposal to merge with Social and Political Sciences, which is where I thoughtthe most favorableenvironmentfor social anthropologylay. However we remainedclose friends thoughout our time in Cambridge.
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0084-6570/91/1015-OOO1$02.00

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all those attached to the Departmentfelt an obligation to attend-on the Oxford model, which in turnwas based on the practiceat the London School of Economics. There was literally a continuingclash and exchange of ideas. The seminar crystalized into the CambridgePapers in Social Anthropology, to the first of which, The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (1958), we each contributed.For that volume the centralidea came from Fortes;but we circulatededitorialresponsiblityand each edited subsequentcollections on a particulartopic with a long theoretical introduction.We founded, too, a series, CambridgeStudies in Social Anthropology,which published some 70 volumes before changing its title-many by our staff and students, but including also works by authorsfrom Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. Our backgroundswere very different. Fortes came from a family of Jewish migrantsto South Africa, Leach from a lineage of mill-owners with interests in the Argentine, myself from a more modest background in the Home Counties. I had originallygone up to Cambridgeon a scholarshipto read for a degree in English literatureand became interested in, among other things, aspects of the sociology of literature.After my first year at the Universitywar broke out, and for the next six and a half years I was in the army. In the Near East one was broughtface to face not only with a wide varietyof humanityGreeks, Turks, Egyptians, Palestinians,Jews-but also with the remnantsof ancient civilizations. Directly I had an opportunity began to read works such I as Childe's WhatHappened in History? That opportunitycame sooner than I anticipated,since I was capturedby the Germanarmyat Tobrukin June 1942 and spent the next two and a half years in and out of prisoncamps in Italy and Germany. There I was also able to read fairly widely, following up various interests, but the situationin which I found myself also turnedmy attentionto the variety of human behavior. Spending time with Italian peasants in the Abruzzi and with men of various nationalities, origins, and personalities in camp made me think about social relations in a more sociological and psychological frame. On my release I was particularlyattractedto the work being done at the Tavistock Instituteof Human Relations in London, which was concerned with returningprisonersof war. When I returnedto Cambridgein 1946 I completed a degree in English, then switched to the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. After some years of inactivity in prison camp I was unwilling to think of spending more time in the rarified atmosphere of the University so, having completed a Diploma, I took a job in adult educationof a more basic kind. Even when I decided to returnto the social sciences it was not with the aim of spendingmy life working on "other cultures". I went to West Africa not primarily because I wanted to become an Africanist but because I had become interestedin the comparativestudy of human society more generally and intendedto returnwith a perspective that would enable me betterto look at Europeanculture, possibly at those Italian

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peasantswho had fascinatedme when I was hiding among them, more likely the inhabitantsof Britain itself with whose future I was deeply concerned in the aftermath war. It is difficult to reconstruct situationthatfaced many of the of my generation at that period. If I may put the matter a little more dramaticallythan an Englishman should, I saw post-war Britain under the Labor government of 1945 as the national outcome of many lives like my own: We had grown up between the two wars, with an interval of only 21 years from one terrifyingdestructionto the next, and lived our adolescence underthe shadow of continentalfascism, with its devastatingoppression and annihiliationof man by man both in ideology and in practice. This period began with the Japaneseattackson China, the colonial wars of Italy, the civil war in Spain, and the expansion of Germany, against the backgroundof widespreadsuppressionand maltreatment those countries. There followed in for my generationsome six-and-a-halfyears of life underarms, duringwhich time all one could look forwardto was post-war reconstruction,throughthe national government and through the United Nations. That reconstructionobviously involved the dissolution of earlier empires, the whole process of decolonization that began with India in 1947 and that was envisaged, at least underLaborrule and to some extent by Conservative politicians as well, as graduallyextending to the rest of the colonial territories. In a sense the deconstructionof the empire was part and parcel of the reconstructionof Britain. And although we were not fully aware of the consequences of decolonization, it was a heady prospect, indeed a heady actuality, too, for the major part of the process was over within some ten years, by 1960, the Year of Africa. The Gold Coast, where I chose to work, led the way and became the independentnation of Ghana in 1957 under the premiershipof Kwame Nkrumah.It was this general backgroundset against five years' residence in the country that led me to write about matters that touched on political theory and development.2Anthropologistshad often tried to avoid administrators problemsof development.That seemed a churlish and way of treating the new Africa that was coming into being so rapidly. That new Africa was also demandinga history. Again earlier anthropologists had often steered away from historicalconsiderations,partlybecause of the often rash speculationsof theirpredecessorsaboutthe past, partlybecause of an alternative methodological approach associated with fieldwork, and partly for the practicalreason that archives and recordswere officially closed for a 50-year period. The situationhad changedin many respects. Particularly in Francemany anthropologists began to explore the historicaldimension, and elsewhere, too, historians became interested in anthropol.ogicalresearch
2For example, I wrote articles on "Consensusand dissent in Ghana"(1968), "Rice-Burning and the GreenRevolution"(1980), as well as on generalimpedimentsto developmentin Africa as compared to Asia. Much else exists in the unpublishedform of talks.

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paradigm was ready to be and approaches. The "structural-functional" loosened in a number of ways. My own choice of Ghana was largely personal. At Cambridge I was friendly with Joe Reindorf, later Attorney General, who started a PhD in history, finished a law degree at the same time, and then returnedto Ghanato work with the firm of a relative, Victor Owusu. Owusu was closely identified with the Ashanti oppositionto the ConventionPeople's Party, althoughJoe's own sympathies lay elsewhere.3 Since I had a family I did not want to work too far from Europe;in those days of boat travel, distance mattered.For this reason when I followed my colleagues to Oxford, after the spell in adult education, I was asked to talk to Meyer Fortes, the West Africanist, my first encounter with whom I have described elsewhere (17a). In his review of social anthropologyin West Africa, Keith Hart speaks of Cambridgeschool of Fortes and Goody (17). From the structural-functional is the standpointof ethnographyand fieldwork, such a characterization no doubt correct. But as he goes on to point out, the intellectualpreoccupations in my researchhad otherroots. Few studentsin the 1930s could avoid having to make some kind of resolutionof their interestsin two majorfigures, Marx and Freud. My contact with Marxism had by then been longstanding, but there were other influences. Through social anthropology I encountered Durkheim,throughHarvardstudentsof social relationsI encounteredWeber, as well as Parsons (with whom I later worked for a year when he was at Cambridge).But equally importantto me in the early phases was Freud, as well as the interests I had developed in studying literatureand history. In literatureI was strongly influenced by the "New Criticism"associated with F. R. Leavis and other contributersto Scrutiny, regardingnot only the creativeartsthemselves but also theirwhole groundingin society. One further currentthat affected many of my generationwas the logico-positivism of the that Vienna circle and the subsequenttransformations appearedin the AngloSaxon world. Of particularimportance for me was the work of the contributorsto the InternationalEncyclopaedia of Unified Science edited by 0. Neurath,R. Carnap,and C.W. Morrisfrom Chicago (1938- ), which included worksby E. Nagel, L. Hogben, and many others. Two other factors of a differentkind played a partin defining my fields of interest.Over six years of war had left their mark:Life in a prison camp led me to wonderhow people got on or came into conflict with one another;life in the army encouraged an interest in the military side of "other cultures". clinical analysis of feud in his lectures in Cambridge in Evans-Pritchard's 1946-1947 helped to place those years of experience in a wider context, and
3i had later the pleasureof acting briefly as his clerk in the reknownedAl-Hajji Baba case in Kumasi in 1957. where the Governmenttried to exDel him from Ghana as an alien.

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the threatof nuclearwarfarecontinuedto keep "conflictstudies"in the center of one's vision. If Marx drew my attentionto modes of production,the "New Criticism"and logical positivism to modes of communicationand of thought, so did the times lead me to consider modes of destruction. Largely at Fortes' promptingI went to work in a community in Northern Ghana. These were the LoDagaa (or Lobi as the British then called them, or the Dagari or Dagaraas they were known to the Frenchand now generally to themselves), a study of whom had been listed as a priorityin RaymondFirth's report to the Colonial Social Science Research Council.4 The LoDagaa inhabited an area that lay astride the Black Volta, which served as the boundarybetween the anglophonecolony of the Gold Coast (laterGhana)and the francophone colony of Haute Volta (later Burkino Faso). I was thus requiredto become familiarwith the early Frenchwriting aboutthe region as well as with Frenchanthropologymore generally. That encounterenabled me to to indulge my enduringattraction Franceand at the same time to modify, in the course of time and in marginalways, some of my Anglo-Saxon attitudes. Fortes directed my attentionto the LoDagaa partlybecause he had carried Ashanti Tallensi and the "matrilineal" out research among the "patrilineal" and was interestedin those societies of which the Yako of Nigeria, studiedby Daryll Forde, was the paradigmaticcase, in which named unilineal descent groups of a patrilinealand a matrilinealkind existed side by side-that is to say, everyone was a member of one of each set. I became involved in the topic of descent of necessity, for it was the subjectof lively discussion among graduatestudents. I also took up other topics on which people were working at the time, such as the developmental cycle of domestic groups (8), the maintenanceof social control in acephalouscommunities(7), the role of the mother's brother(9), and the general theme of incest itself (6). These topics drew me into comparativeanalyses that I later pursued with Esther Goody using material on the societies of northernGhana for the purposes of controlledcomparison(10, 11). Anothergeneralquestionthatstruckme was how communities defined themselves not only in opposition to one another but often in relation to particularactivities, so that among the LoDagaa one's identificationwas with those to the east in one context and with those to the west in another. That is to say, in the Gold Coast at that time there were no "real" Lobi and Dagari, just a series of communities who defined their similarities and differences by means of these roughly directional terms'The Colonial Social Science ResearchCouncil, working under the inspiredsecretaryshipof Sally Chilver, was responsiblefor administeringthe grantsthat enabled Lloyd Fallers, Jim and Paula Bohannan, Al and Grace Harris, and Bob Armstrongto work, first at Oxford, then in Africa. At the end of the war the Council promoted surveys of research needs in the social by sciences in West Africa (undertaken RaymondFirth), in East Africa (by Isaac Schapera),and in Sarawak (by EdmundLeach).

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Lo(bi) = west, matrilineal;and Dagaa(ri,ra, ti) east, patrilineal(to simplify a more complex situation). I was interestedin both the subtle differences in the importanceof descent groups among and for the LoDagaa and in their systems of kinship, family and marriageat the domestic level. Indeed I attempted, in the spirit of the times, to look at the total range of the community's activities. When I came back after one year, between field trips, I wrote a general account for the Bachelor of Lettersdegree at Oxford, which was laterpublishedas The Social Organisationof the LoWiili(1956). I then returned Africa to live in another to area of the LoDagaa country where more emphasis was given to the matrilineal clans. Here was a case of "doubledescent"along the lines of the Yako in that movable property(cattle, money, grain)was visualized as belonging to the matrilineal clan (or belo, species) and was inherited between, first, maternalsiblings and then by sister's sons-that is, between uterinekinsfolk; whereas immovables (houses and land) were transmitted within the patrilineal clans, between, first, maternalsiblings and then to sons-that is, between agnates. My major interest in this situation lay in the problematicof Malinowski and Fortes, relating to the different nature of interpersonalties in patrilinealand matrilinealsocieties, dependingupon the systems of authority, transmission, and organization.That is, my interestlay in an attemptto link the social and personality systems in Parsons's terms, or, in more general terms, the approachesof Marx and Freud. My doctoral thesis, a much-revised version of which was published as Death, Property, and the Ancestors (Stanford, 1962), was intendedto be an analysis of the religion of the LoDagaa. Having already written a general account of the social organization, on my second return I completed a historical and ethnographicoutline of the region in orderto supply a context for my more detailed studies.5 The concentrationon religion resulted partly from the fact that Fortes had written two major studies on the political and kinship systems of the Tallensi, which were sufficiently like those of the
5An Ethnographyof the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, West of the White Volta (1954). I have subsequentlypublished, often in obscureplaces, a numberof contributionsto the ethnographic, historical, and linguistic study of the region. I would like to acknowledge the collaborationof a number of scholars working in the lively Institute of Africa Studies at the Universityof Ghana, Legon, at that time under the direction of Thomas Hodgkin-especially Kwame Arhin, Ivor Wilks, and Nehemiah Levtzion. At the same time I would pay tributeto my long-standingcollaboratorsamong the LoDagaa, especially S. W. D. K. Gandah,and among the chief of his kingdom and wrote Gonja, especially the late J. A. Braimah,who became paramount extensively about its history; with BraimahI edited Salaga: The Strugglefor Power (1967). I have said little aboutthese historicalpapersin this account, but they were important providing in a diachronicview of the region as well as in tryingto allow for the influences, both stabilizingand disruptive, that colonial governmentshad on the peoples among whom earlier anthropologists were working, whether in Africa, the Americas, or Russia.

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LoDagaato makeme directmy attention elsewhere.LikeEvans-Pritchard, Fortes left the monographon religion to the end, as was the usual progressionin analysingfield material the time, TheWorkof the Gods followingon fromWe at the Tikopia.I chose to take anotherdirection.My materialon the religiouslife was rich, partlybecause I had attendedso many funeralsand sacrifices,partly becauseof an earlier interest mythandritual,partlybecauseI knewpeoplewho in would discuss these matters,and partlybecausethe Bagre ceremonywas being in performed the valley below my house duringmy first year. Not only could I attendthe public aspectsof this initiation,but I had the good fortuneto meet a man who had become marginalto the society itself. He offered to recite his versionof the Bagreso thatI couldwriteit down, andhe thentook the troubleto explainmanyof its details.It was unheard at the time to recitebeforesomeone of who was not a memberof the association,and at firstI was reluctant publish. to But local friendsthoughtit would be betterto do so as a way of recordingthe richnessof their culture. My first aim was to presenta generalanalysis of LoDagaareligion. Having previously sketched out the social organization,I was obviously concerned with those aspects linked to relativelypermanent roles and groupings(as with ancestors and descent groups, earth shrines and parishes). But I was also interested in the turnoverdisplayed by cults such as those associated with medicine shrines, which migrated from one group to the next over a wide range of territory. Such cults were markedby a rise and fall, by birth and obsolescence, by the recognition of the God who failed as well as by the innovative capacities of those seeking new and differentsolutions to old and persistent problems. A quest was involved, one that was intellectual and problem-solvingas well as emotional and theological. The structureof meaning to the actors had first to be elucidated, including the overt symbolism of ritual acts. Although the aim of the thesis was to presenta study of the whole domain of ritual and religion, I never got furtherthan an analysis of funerals (and of the ancestors), the topic on which I had begun, takingit to representthe point of transitionand of transmissionbetween this world and the next. On this one aspect there seemed already too much to say, especially if one tried to take into account what previous writersin a varietyof disciplines had contributed. In any case the interestthe subject held for me ranged outside the sphere of religion narrowly conceived. Among the problems with which I was concerned in discussing LoDagaa funeralswere those I relatedto the work of Marxand Freud. Therewere other influences. The French school, including the work of Van Gennep and especially Hertz, was most relevant;some have seen this trend as dominant. Others have taken the analysis of the role of kin groups based on matrilineal and patrilineal descent to lie at the core. Typical of this first view is the

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certains comment of JacquesLombard:"De meme, J. Goodie (sic), reprenant themes de R-B (Radcliffe-Brown),a explique la fonction de rites mortuaires au en les liant 'ala structuresociale et plus particulierement statutdu defunt et de ses proches"(19). Lombardcontraststhe work of Middleton, Turner,and myself with that of Douglas, Lienhardt, and Beidelman who wanted to and "desociologise le religieux" following the studies of Evans-Pritchard the volume edited by Forde entitled African Worlds. The contrastis too stark. It seemed hardly possible to deal with a rite de passage without building upon Van Gennep's pioneering work, nor did it seem useful to discuss "symbolic"meanings without recourse to the classic but equally simple techniquesdeveloped by Radcliffe-Brownand Srinivasthat is, without being concerned with "action".While I dealt with the way social groups, including descent groups, emerged and participatedso clearly in the funerals, I was also specifically interestedin (a) differences in funeral practicesthat were not connectedwith sociological variables;and (b) meaning to the actorsof the acts, verbaland gestural, in which they were engaged, as a of counterpoiseto the interpretations the anthropologist.Indeed my hesitation to use a varietyof hardyanthropological concepts, such as ritual, religion, the sacred, and the profane-except as vague sign-posts-was precisely because they were not based upon, nor did they reflect, indigenous categories, which were more complex and more shaded than such constructs allowed. Above all, my centralthrustwas aimed in anotherdirection, more closely linked to much of my later work. In looking at these aspects of religious action and belief, I reviewed earlierstudies of ancestorworship, of funerals, and in particularof patternsof grief and mourning.How did the behavior of individualsin these situationscorrespondto the wider contexts of their lives? The question raised issues considered by Malinowski and Fortes when they examined matrilinealsystems with the aim of specifying the typical patterns of tension and cathexis, of ties and cleavages, in interpersonalrelations. It was a theme pursued by Malinowski when he argued that the "Oedipus complex" was not universal but was linked to a particularrange of social institutions. The centraltheme of the enterprisewas parallelto one thatdeveloped in the of study of witchcraft,in particular witchcraftaccusations.Evans-Pritchard's book Magic, Witchcraft and Oracles among the Azande (1937) had attempted to map out the logic of African witchcraft in opposition to the view of Levy-Bruhl that "the primitive mind" was illogical or alogical, unable to perceive contradiction, a theme that I pursued in connection with a very different line of research. What Evans-Pritcharddid not do was look at witchcraftin termsof the relationshipsof accuser, witch, and victim. Starting with the work of Nadel, these relationshipscame to comprise an important topic in the two post-wardecades, in Europeas well as Africa, as the work of

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Favret and others has shown. Gluckmanextendedthe analysis to the realm of gossip, and my own work on ancestor worship raised problems of a similar kind. Who were the ancestors seen as most likely to demand sacrifices from the living, and were these relationshipslinked to the control they had exercised and to the benefits received? The tensions that arose between those who gave and those who received were in turnconnected with the incidence of grief, with the particular situationsof the dead and the living, and with the guilt about a deceased parent for whom one may not have done enough or whom one had left on his or her own in old age. That connection was often made at the less explicit levels of the mind, and the general link with Freudis obvious. I was concernedto elaborateand differentiatethe relevantkinds of tension thatmarkedrelationsbetween the generations.It was not simply a question of "splitting the Oedipus complex" (between roles) as Malinowski had argued for the matrilinealTrobriands,where mother's brothercounterpoisedfather, but of splitting up the Oedipus complex, the intergenerational relationshipof conflict, into its analytic components, some of which were concerned with sexual jealousy, others with the process of socialization, and others with authoritymore generally. This is where Marx was relevent. For an important element in preindustrialsocieties of this kind was the tension arising out of inheritance,the tension between the holderof propertyand the heirs. My field data came from the two adjacentcommunities I have mentioned, in one of which all male propertywas transmitted between fathersand sons while in the otherimmovables(land and houses) passed in thatway and movables between a man and his sister's sons (in both cases afterfull sibling in the same farming group). In the lattercase, that of a fully fledged double-descentsystem, these tensions were particularly in evidence; they were quite explicit and the splitting quite formal. My enquiry aimed to examine differences in the funeral and ancestral ceremonies of the two adjacentcommmunitiesand to try to explain at least some of these by referenceto the differences in the transmissionof property. Not all differences were so explained. I had no monocausalanswer. OthersI consideredto be the resultof intellectualexploration,yet othersperhapsas the result of culturaldrift. But certaincentraldifferencesI did see relatedto social relationships, and these I discussed in a chapterentitled "The Merry Bells: TransmissionandIts Conflicts,"which was the preludeto a Inter-generational general analysis of property and inheritance, before I engaged upon an enquiry into the institutionsof the LoDagaa themselves. Those 50 pages are for me among the most critical I have written. Beginning with Freud and Fromm, I went on to refer to Engels's discussion of productionand reproduction in The Origins of the Family (1884). I attempted here, and later in Production and Reproduction (1977), to see kinship and the economy as

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distinct but related, and to do so at a more formal analyticallevel than those who had concentrated upon them separately.I saw thata key lay in the areaof the intergenerationaltransmission of goods, including the instruments of livelihood, especially in the basic means of productionat the domestic level in precapitalist(or non-industrial) societies, as well as in the authorityrelations associated with their management. By attemptingto deconstructintergenerational relations in this way, tensions based on sexual rights and domestic authoritycould be given separate considerationfrom those based on differentforms of propertyrights, each in turnbeing linked to the processes of productionand reproduction.In addition I needed to distinguish the transmissionof office (succession) from that of property(inheritance)since these might well diverge. The latter gave rise to the kinds of tension broughtout in the speech of Henrythe Fourthto his son, Prince Hal (the futureHenry V), when the latterfinds the king sleeping in his room and, thinking him dead, picks up the crown. The waking king reprimands his son:
Thy wish was father, Hanfy, to that thought. I stay too long by thee, I weary thee. Dost thou hunger for mine empty chair That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honours Before thy hour be ripe?. . . Thou hast stol'n that which, after some few hours, Were thine without offence;. . . Thy life did manifest thou lov'dst me not, And thou wilt have me die assur'd of it. . . Then get thee gone, and dig my grave thyself; And bid the merry bells ring to thine ear That thou art crowned, not that I am dead. (Henry IV, Pt. 2, iv, 2)

The notion of the "merrybells" was intrinsicto what I called, for short, the Prince Hal complex, which emerges in anticipatory acts of wish-fulfillmentas well as in the mixed reactions to death itself, inducing feelings of guilt and appeasement. Putting together these relationships, which featured conflict as well as cooperation, I presented a schematic table (Table 1). Problems of succession to high office played a minimal part in LoDagaa life, for there was little or nothingthat fell into that category. The last row of the table referredinstead to enquiries among the Gonja of northernGhana where I had been working with Esther Goody and where I was especially interested in one particularaspect of the political system. Instead of direct intergenerationalsuccession, such as we find among modern monarchies,

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Table 1 The Transferof Rights Between Roles Authorized transfer(prescribed Role propter mortem) relationships inheritance levirate, etc holder-heir husbandlevir, etc incumbentsuccessor

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Type of exclusive right property sexual

Unauthorized transfer theft adultery, incest, abduction,etc usurpation

Role relationships holder-thief cuckoldadulterer,etc ruler-rebel

roles and office

succession

each vacancy entailed a lateral shift of power between different segments of the ruling estate. While this rotationalmovement was sometimes phrasedin terms of fraternalsuccession, the "brothers" were very distant"relatives,"the kinship term referringto the membersof other segments of the ruling group. The importantrule was that, in an expression from Mampong in Asante, the elephantnever sleeps in the same place twice. No segment should hold office for longer than the reign of one incumbent (12). Rotationaland next-of-kinsystems resultedin differentlines of tension and alliance. When the prince was no longer the next heir to his father, he had more to gain by keeping him on the throne than by his disappearance.The contrast lay not only in the implications or consequences of rotational as against direct succession, but also in the possible predisposingfactors ("causal" factors) that pertained to the systems of political power. In rotational systems, power is distributed,for instance, among the members of a mass dynasty each of whom retains an interestin the holding (or holders) of high office. The confinementof those eligible for high office to close ratherthanto distant kin means a narrowratherthan a mass dynasty. The different ways power is distributedmay relate to, among other things, the control of the means of destruction (or the means of coercion, as Ernest Gellner has suggested) on which most early states and many modern ones are ultimately based. In West Africa a narrowdynasty tended to arise where the means of coercion were controlledby a professionalgroup, as often with firearmswhen they reached the simpler societies, partly because of the investment and technical skills requiredwhen arms were imported.Whereas a mass dynasty tended to be associatedwith the equality of status and opportunityassociated with a ruling class of armedhorsemen. The ruling estate in Gonja constituted such a mass dynasty comprisingroughly 20% of the population;power was rotated between the owners of the means of coercion, that is, between the chiefs with their horses and armed followers. Interest in the nature of the ownership of the means of destruction ran

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parallelto interestin the natureand the ownershipof the means of production and the way that this effected and was affected by the intergenerational wrote of distributionof resources. At the political level many anthropologists feudal and tributarysystems in Africa as if they were similar to those of Europe or Asia (12a). The comparison seemed to me weak-not so much because of the distributionof power as such but because of the differences in productive systems (including craft production) within which power was exercised. The major states of Eurasia were characterizedby the intensive cultivation of "advanced"agriculturetypified by the use of the plough or irrigationwhile a more extensive hoe cultivation marked Africa (and other farmareas such as New Guinea), usually involving shifting, slash-and-burn did ing. The extensive system of agriculture not preventthe rise of the state in Africa, but thatstate had usually to be based on taxes on trade(or exports)and on raiding neighbors for slaves ratherthan on the internal accumulationof production, since any such surplus was surplus throughprimaryagricultural and usually limited in size, in transportability, in exchange potential. Booty production and taxes on trade obviously affected the external relations bedistribution states separated of tween peoples, giving rise to the characteristic peoples. Internally,too, that differenceaffected the by bands of "acephalous" nature of hierarchyin that under extensive systems the control of land as a factor of production gave no overwhelming advantage to the rulers. The differential transmissionof resources was also affected. Under a more "advanced" agriculture, land was a scarce good and its control differentially distributedwithin the hierarchy and between particularfamilies. In such a situation different strata would have their own strategies for passing down propertyand managingthe estate, partlyin orderto preservetheirhierarchical position. Indeed different families would have their own strategies of marriage, management,and heirship. In Production and Reproduction(1977), I tried to sketch out some of the general implications of this difference for kinship relations-for example, in encouragingin-marriageratherthan outmarriage.If there are few resourcesto protect, then the marriageof chiefs to commonersmay be a sound political strategy,extendingthe cross-cuttingties that ensue from unions between statusgroups. Such marriagesfrequentlytook place in Gonja, where the political benefits were overtly recognized. This interestled me to ask why, for example, one found formal adoptionin Eurasia but not in Africa, although fostering was common in parts of that continent, as Esther Goody discusses in her work on Gonja and West Africa generally (4, 5). One function of the widespreadadoptionthat existed earlier in Eurasia was to provide an heir for the heirless, and often a person to continue the ancestralcult after death. These considerationsbecame relevant when the transmissionof property,especially propertyin land that differentiated positions in the hierarchy, became of importance. Similar con-

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siderationsapplied to the distributionof monogamy and polygyny as well as of other institutionssuch as filiacentricunions (the incoming son-in-law), for one aspect of all these practiceswas their role as mechanismsof heirship and continuity, of transmitting relatively scarceresourcesbetween generations,as well as of passing down the managementof those resources. While none of these features (nor indeed any featuresof human society) are monolithically tied to any other variable, they do constitutea cluster of featuresthat I called the "women's property complex". Under such hierarchicalsystems efforts were made to maintainthe position of daughtersas well as of sons, especially by means of endowmentand/orinheritance.Such modes of transmissionwere significantly linked to advanced forms of agricultureunder which dowry as distinctfrom bridewealthprevailed, for it was then thatthe maintenanceof the position of daughtersbecame an issue. This distinction was discussed in a volume of CambridgePapers, Bridewealth and Dowry (1973), writtenwith S. J. Tambiah. This work entailed a very broad comparisonbetween Africa and the major societies of Asia and Europe. My interest in European kinship had been partly fuelled by the examination of inheritancesystems developed in the book on LoDagaa funerals. But I was also struckby the fact that in WesternEurope, unlike Rome, India, and China (but like Islam and Judaism), adoption was not practiced after the 5th centuryAD until the 20th century, or the mid-19th in partsof the United States. It was this situationthat constitutedone of the startingpoints for The Developmentof Family and Marriage in Europe (1983). The absence of adoption and certain other mechanisms of heirship in Europe seemed related to the fact that it was the Churchthat effectively established itself as the heir when family continuityfailed (andclaimed a substantialsharein other situations). One priestlywriterof 5th-centuryFrancedescribedthe adoptedas "childrenof perjury."They cheated God of the goods that He had first given to mankind and that should be returnedto Him at death throughhis church. Some allowance was made for the childrenof one's own "blood",but others were improperrecipients of the goods rightly belonging to the Church and which should be used for God's purposes. In this way Christian doctrine and the demandsof an ecclesia were consistent with the realignmentof strategies of heirship at the familial level, and by this and other means the Church rapidly became owner of a third of the available farming land of Europe. The work on which I have recentlybeen engaged, entitledThe Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive(1990), pursuesthis analysis amongthe majorstates of Asia, includingthe ancientand modem Near East. While one can differentiate ChristianEuropefrom the rest of Eurasiaon the basis of what the Church took and how it did so, certainmain featuresof kinship systems in the major states of the Old World are sufficiently similar in a structuralsense to

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cast serious doubt not only upon the way many anthropologistsand sociologists have treatedthis aspect of "the uniquenessof the West," but also upon the way this same theme has been pursuedby a numberof Europeanhistorians of the family (and especially by English ones). This difference with regardto the influence of an establishedecclesia with monasticinstitutionsis less clear under Buddhism, which may be why Japan, Tibet, and Sri Lanka share certain structuralresemblances. It is true that the marriageage for both men and women was later in Europe and that in-living life-cycle servants were more common, but these features of domestic life in the West do not seem sufficient to accountin a significantway for any predispositionit had towards the developmentof capitalism, as has sometimes been suggested or assumed. Indeed as we look at the rapid development of industrialcapitalism in East Asia (and elsewhere in Asia) today, and at the increasingcontrastwith Africa, the uniqueness of the West seems less significant than the uniqueness of Asia has contributed greatdeal and has never a Eurasia.To this "uniqueness" been the stagnant oriental society (though all societies have been this at particularperiods) of which Europeanwriters have written. In this recent volume I tried to modify the notion that an unbridgeablegulf exists between the kinship systems of premodem Europe and Asia-a constant theme of European historians. But anthropologists, too, have been overly ready to compare Chinese and South Indian "kinship systems" with those of the Australianaborigines, or have singled out features in Ancient Egypt and Arabiato comparewith those of Africa. Such comparisonstake a restrictedview of what constitutes a "system"of kinship and marriage. My thrusthas been to look at the entiredomestic domain, especially in relationto the economy, and to argue that neither Oriental nor Ancient systems were in societies of Europein ''primitive" this sense but resembledthe preindustrial many significant respects. This work on kinship inevitably raised mattersthat verge on demography, and it has often been historical demographers,such as the members of the Cambridge Group, who have discussed crucial issues about comparative family structures.Demographicthemes have played a consistentpartin West African ethnography;intensive census data had to be collected in any examination of the cycle of domestic groups discussed by Fortes (see 8), but both he and others such as Oppong made more systematic attempts to integratetheir findings with wider demographicconcerns. I sought a way of assessing the numberof individuals who, under different demographicconditions, would be left without male or female heirs, a question that was of direct importancein the resortto certainstrategiesof heirship. There was also the possibility that the differentkinship regimes of Africa and Eurasiamight have varying effects on the number and especially the sex of children in a

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family. N. Addo and I collected a large sample of completed families in Ghana and found no evidence of any discriminationin favor of one sex, but rather a strategy of maximum numbers (12). This evidence was compared with other large samples of sibling groupswhere these were available, but we found less difference than anticipated(14, 15). However, the results were consistent with the fact that in Africa, as distinct from Asia, there was no evidence of any discrimination by sex in, for example, the survival of children. Other enquiries showed that people went as far to hospital for a daughter as they did for a son, and it was generally recognized that in a bridewealthsystem any domestic group needed equal numbersof both sexes to get the best results from marriagetransactions. I began this account by explaining how I was led to work on the ritualand religion of the LoDagaa partly because of my involvement with the Bagre association during whose rites a long myth is recited. This work became an importantstrandof my researchfrom thatday to this. I had been interestedin myth and othergenres, both in oral and writtencultures,mainly because I had read some English medieval literature,to which I was directedpartly by the interpretativenotes to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". In prisoner-of-war camp in GermanyI had been fortunateto find a copy of Frazer'sThe Golden Bough in the libraryas well as E. K. Chambers'sstudy of TheMedieval Stage and other similar works much influenced by earlieranthropology.One of the first series of lectures I delivered in Cambridgein the early 1950s was on the subject of myth, before it had become so fashionable a topic with the publication of Levi-Strauss's major works. As the result of these interests I was never inclined simply to treat myths and legends in the Malinowskian fashion as "charters" social situations, as many of his pupils tended to do of (see, for example, 3 and 18). Just as in my ethnological work in the region I saw an element of "history"in legend and genealogy, so too I saw some intellectualquest in myth, with the importantlevel of meaning located in the actor domain ratherthan purely in the deep structureposited by those who tended to see the surface meaning as "absurd"and fantastic. I wanted to understand explicit as well as the implicit meaningto the actors, and hence the I was interested in the words as words, in the text as text, or ratherin the utterance as utterance. The advent of the transistorizedtape recorder made this possible to an altogether different extent than before. Of course, electronic recording had previously been available and was used in ethnographicresearch, mainly for recording music and song. That was the case for the important work of Milman Parryand A. B. Lord in Yugoslavia in the 1930s, when Parryset out to study some of the characteristic featuresof "oral"epic in orderto determine the statusof thatgreatinterstitialfigure, Homer. Lordsubsequentlypublished

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a volume called TheSinger of Tales (1960), which has rightlybeen the source of much subsequent inspiration, research, and debate. But Parryand Lord were workingwith cafe singers in Europe, with secular song in a region where electricity was available and where the church maintainedits hold over religious action and belief. It was a very different story in field situationswhere the recitals were ritual, often secret, and made only in formal conditions, and where the possibilities for mechanicalrecording were minimal. The change in technology had importanteffects on the study of oral discoursein the simplersocieties, probablyas importantas many broad"theoretical" shifts, especially in the sphereof pragmatics.Its influence has been of a cumulativekind. For the first time it has enabledanthropologists to record long recitations like the Bagre in situ, in the actual conditions of performance-in other words, to create a reasonably accurate text from a ritual utterance, one that can be checked back against the tape. It has also enabled them to make repeated recordings over time and so to examine questions of continuity and change in these standardoral forms. In earlier times only one version was usually available, and even that was often a summaryof a recitationwritten down from an "informant's" recollection of the original performance. Not only did the summary concentrate on the retellable, narrativeelements, but the impression was also left that there existed a single authorizedversion. Any differencestended to be attributed to the mistakes of observers, or alternatively to structuralfactors. The new technology made it possible to examine the elements of individualintellectual exploration, of creative innovation, as Barth has done for the Ok of New Guinea (1) using comparative evidence, or as I have begun to do for the Bagre-more programmatically,perhaps, than in actuality. Of course such explorations occur within a set of constraints, but which constraits will be relevant in any specific case is difficult or impossible to predict. The first version (published as The Myth of the Bagre in 1972) I wrote down from dictation; the process took a full ten days. Since then I have worked with my friend, S. W. D. K. Gandah, with whose help we have recorded, transcribed,translated,and annotatedanotherfour versions of the Black Bagre and ten of the White, a long and arduousprogramof work. One of these versions was published in 1981 as Une Recitation du Bagre', with French and English translations. Having originally thought the recitation highly standardized, were suprisedto find the rangeof variation.Together we with Colin Duly, an attemptwas made to analyse this range by means of the computer, the results of which were set out in an unpublishedreportfor the Social Science ResearchCouncil (13). Oursample was small but nevertheless produced a far greaterbody of data than for any other long oral recitationto date. It enabled us to compare the performanceof different speakers on the same occasion and of the same speaker on different occasions. The former

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varied more widely than the latter, indicating that no one learned precisely anyone else's version but always introducedvariantsof his own. The result was that suprisingly different recitations were to be found in nearby communities, though they were all recognized by the actors to be the same "Bagre." The dictated version was longer, richer, and more sophisticated linguistically and thematicallythan those we recordedelectronically, owing something to the personal accomplishmentsof the speaker, but also to the natureof dictation, the pauses in which enabled him to elaborateto a greater extent than was possible in the rapid recitativo of the actual ritual performance. The dictated version was also significantly more theocentric in that greaterattentionwas paid to the partplayed by the High God, althoughhe is given much more prominence throughoutthan would appearfrom ordinary social interaction. I have used the work on the Bagre in a numberof ways, but chiefly to draw out some features that contrastedwith written literarygenres. That contrast has turnedon the role of verbatimmemorizing, which I find charateristicof societies with writing, the emerging division between creatorand performer (both artistsin theirown way), and the tighterstructure writtenworks. As a of consequence I would see both the work of Homerin Greece and the Rig Veda in India as the products of early literate societies rather than purely oral cultures. These studies of the effects of the introductionof writing on oral genres were published in The Interface between the Writtenand the Oral (1987). This work was partof a series of studiesthatbegan with a fortunatecollaboration with Ian Watt, Professor of English at Stanford University, on "the consequences of literacy," the title of the article we published in 1963 (16). Watt and I had attended the same College at Cambridge where we were influenced by the work of Q. D. Leavis and otherson the relationshipamong changes in the productionof readingmaterial,the natureof the audience, and the content and form of literaryworks (see, for example, 31 and 33). We had also been througha long period of warfare, and especially of imprisonment, where books were scarce or absent, that led us to pursue an interest in the influence of modes of communication on human societies, especially the introductionof writing. Watt providedmuch of the initial inspiration,but my later engagement was greater, for the project made possible an historical or even "evolutionary"approach to some of the problems of differentiating "simple"and "complex"societies, which were the staple of anthropological discussions and certainlyof anthropological categories. Differences in cognitive processes could be looked at in a developmentalway, which made me less willing to accept in its entirety the elusive relativisim of much anthropological discourse. In our essay we attempted a broad assessment of the contributionthat

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writing, and specifically alphabetic writing, had made to human cultures. Acknowledgingthe work of Havelock and of membersof the TorontoSchool, we looked at the intellectual contributionsof the Greeks against the background of their invention of a fully alphabeticscript, especially in regardto ideas of "myth"and history, concepts of time and space, notions of democracy, categories of intellectualactivity, andthe notions of logic and contradiction that Levy-Bruhl had found absent from "primitive"societies. While accepting that Evans-Pritchardwas correct to refute this proposition, we argued that "logic" in the limited philosophical sense, as well as the refinement of proof and contradiction,were critically dependentupon the use of writing. Subsequently this research was continued in an edited volume, entitled Literacy in Traditional Society (1968), which examined instances of the impact of writing on mainly tribalsocieties. In the course of this later work I came to qualify the weight placed upon alphabeticwriting in Greece, partly of because the introduction the alphabetitself was less clear cut than formerly suggested by Indo-European(as distinct from Semitic) scholars, and partly because a numberof the features that had been seen as consequentialon the introductionof that script appearedas embryonicin earlier forms of writing itself. The results of these enquiriesinto the cognitive effects of early writing systems appearedin the Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) in which attentionwas drawnto the role of lists and tables in early writtencultures as ways of organizinginformationin non-speech-likeways. That work led to a profitable collaborationin the field of "literacy"studies with psychologists Michael Cole and David Olsen. The former invited me to cooperate in his researchinto the uses and cognitive implicationsof the indigenous Vai script in Liberia, a test case in such investigationsbecause learningthis script took place separatelyfrom school education. We were fortunateto come across a body of writing by A. Sonie that amply illustratedthe powerful role which writing could play in reorganizing informationfor the purposes of recall, logical presentation, and accountability. The research proceeded in two directions. The Interface (1987) volume gatheredtogetherstudies on genres and similartopics. Previousto that, in The Logic of the Writingand the Organisationof Society (1986), I had suggested ways the introductionof writing had influenced the domains of religion, the economy, politics, and law. At the same time I had tried to elucidate certain anthropologicaland sociological problems surroundingthe broad difference between "primitive"and "advanced,"simpler and more complex societies. One of the majorpressuresbehind the studies on writinghad been to get away from the simplistic dichotomies of much social science, in order to isolate some of the mechanisms behind sociocultural changes; one such set of mechanisms consisted of the mode of communication.But whereas scholars

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had paid much attentionto the effects of languageon social life, the forms and implications of writing had received comparativelylittle notice. That was a situation I tried to remedy. The tape recorder has changed not only the analysis of myth and the proceduresof the anthropologist.It has also produced an emphasis on discourse, on letting the actor speak for himself. Before the appearance sound of movies, ethnographicfilms had to invent a spoken script, a text. Now, as in the Granadatelevision series Disappearing Worlds, the natives could speak for themselves. But the result was in some ways an impedimentto research. Not only was there an overabundanceof material, not only did investigators think less before they turnedon the machine, but there was even a tendency, which remains strong, to consider a presentationof the actor's picture as the be-all and end-all of analytic endeavor. That is verstehen carried to an illogical extreme. Of course there is a lot to be said for recordingas much as we can about "disappearingworlds" before they finally disappear. But this level of ethnography, of reportage ethnology, does not require any great expertise apartfrom a journalisticability to get people to talk into the mike. And it is no substitute for theoretically oriented research or even for the analysis of researchmaterialswithin the frameworkof a scholarly tradition. Understandingthe meaning to the actor may be the ultimate goal for some literary studies; it hardly exhausts all levels of enquiry. The remainingsector of my work relatesboth to the contrastingsociocultural situations in Africa and Eurasia and to the implications of writing. In readinganalyses of cooking in Africa, I was struckby how they differed from my own experience, in terms both of the traditional patternsand of what was emerging in interaction with Europe and the rest of the world (Cooking, Cuisine and Class, 1982). Quantityapart,I found little evidence of different forms of cooking even within most of these African states where a hierarchy existed, no development of an haute cuisine. But as we have seen, different kinds of hierarchy were involved in Africa than in Eurasia where cultural activities and values were by and large held in common. Partly because of frequent intermarriage between the different groups in the hierarchy, there were few tendencies for the emergence of subcultures,except in those ethnically distinct and endogamous ruling classes found in some of the interlacustrinekingdoms of East Africa. Partly because of the nature of the hierarchy, partly because of the productive system, partly because of the absence, except underIslam, of writing, there was less tendency to elaborate a distinctive high cuisine of the sort we find in many of the majorsocieties in Eurasia, with their considerableliteratureson cooking and eating, and their institutionalization the differentiatedproductionand consumptionof food. of My most recentbook, The Cultureof Flowers (in press), pursueswhat is on one level a similar theme. Visiting Bali and carrying out some limited

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fieldwork with Esther Goody in Gujerat, India, I was amazed at the use of cultivated flowers, especially for worship, for which they were deliberately produced and purchased. This "non-utilitarian" form of agriculturewas virtually absentfrom Africa, where the usual form of offering to a shrineis blood sacrifice. A partial explanation of the difference is not hard to find. It concerns the lack of stress in Africa on intensive agriculture,althoughtobacco, onions, and rice were cultivatedby such methods. When I looked at forms of ritual, at pictorial representations,or at the imagery of poetic forms, I found many references to trees, leaves, and roots, but little or nothing on flowers, wild or domesticated,except along the coastal regions of East Africa where influences from India and the Near East had played an obvious part. My suggested reasons for this state of affairs were several, and partly connected with the natureof agriculture.As a comparisonI was led to look in greaterdepth at the major uses of flowers in Europeand Asia. But initially I concentratedupon the historyof flower use since the BronzeAge, its development in the Near East, and especially Ancient Egypt, its culmination in Rome, and then the rapiddecline underChristianity,where the use of flowers was connected with pagan worship, with luxury, as well as with a certain conception of God and a Biblical reluctanceto representHis creatures. The effects of this ambivalence on the history of Europe were radical. After the collapse of Rome, that continentsaw a dramaticdecline in the use of flowers, which had hithertoso often decoratedthe altar, the priest, and the sacrificial animal itself. This decline was paralleled by the virtual disappearanceof three-dimensionalstatuary. Europe also experienced a decline in botanical knowledge which, beyond a certain threshold of folk usage, was partially dependentupon the representation plants, whetheras separateimages or in of manuscripts.The relative backwardnessof medieval Europe with respect to Asia is a significant comment on the effects on systems of knowledge, not only of the barbarianinvasions but of Christianityitself. Europe saw a gradualrenaissancein the growth, the use, and the representation of flowers in graphicand literaryworks from the 12th centuryonwards. The repertoire greatly expanded with the expansion of Europe, with the demand of the aristocratsand bourgeoisie, and with the supply of new plant varieties by traders,missionaries, administrators later by specialist plant and hunters. Before flowers could play a role in cemeteries and in worship they had to overcome deeply established"puritanical" beliefs that tended to differentiate Protestant from Catholic regions. The continuing differences (and similarities) in the use of flowers in Europe and America, the expansion of their use with the expanding economy, and the world marketin cut flowers made possible by the airplane(and before that by the trainand truck)are the subjects of several chapters. That urbanmarketwas linked to the growth of the formal, written"Languageof Flowers"that sprangup in Paris in the early

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of partof the 19thcenturyand soon became acceptedas the reblirth a vanished code of eastern origin. It spreadthroughoutEurope, and the efforts made to adaptthe language to the United States provide an interestingexample of the domestication of the foreign mind. of I pursuethe themes of specialistproduction,of the stratification use, and of a perpetual ambivalence in the culture of flowers in India, China, and Japan, partly based on observationsof the marketsand rituals, of the houses and temples, in those countries. At the end I return to the theme of the in ambivalence about representation Africa itself, this time in respect not of God's creaturesbut of the High God himself, and often of other divinities as well. I arguethat the reluctanceto portraythe CreatorGod displays a concept of of divinity at odds with the characterization African religion as animism and fetishism. The intellectual and cognitive problems of African thought appearcloser to those of Westernman thanis often supposed, especially when we can point to precise reasonsfor some of the difference. At this level, too, it is necessary to reconsider assumptionsabout the uniqueness of the West. I have tried to give some idea of the themes thathave been importantin my research. One constantregrethas been the failureof socioculturalanthropology to become more cumulative.Partof this failurehas to do with the methods seem imprisonedby favored over the past half century. Many anthropologists to their rejection of any method other than fieldwork, being unprepared see how their enquiries relate in a systematic way to those of others. Local knowledge is essential, but for many purposesit is a beginning ratherthan an addictionto a version end. We have come the full cycle since the 19th-century of the comparativemethod. In my view it is essential to integrateand test our observationsand conclusions with materialgatheredby other scholars in this and related fields, using whatever methods we can, imperfect as these will always be. In these resources I include the Human Relations Area Files, which I have tried to use for this purpose. The rejection of techniques other than fieldwork and speculation tends to lead to a withdrawal into deep descriptions of "my people," combined on the one hand with unsystematic global statements and, on the other, with the search for new gods; as with medicine shrines, the old gods become obsolescent as they fail to meet impossible demands. Thus there are shifts-for example, from structuralism to post-modernism-on a basis analogous to the "global exchange" ("global replace")function in computersoftware ratherthan on the modification and development of existing programs. I have said little on my work in changing social systems and in the history of languages and ethnographyof Africa, even though these took up much of my time and energies in the 1960s when I was frequentlyin Ghana. That gap is partly because I have not completed as much in these areas as I wished. Nevertheless the bright hopes for the future and the harsherrealities of the

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present have formed a constant theme of my other research. As with other colleagues, that researchinvolved enteringsome of the no-go areas of earlier scholars and making use of the work of various fields, especially history. This breachin disciplinarywalls has its dangers,and it could be arguedthat the so-called crisis in social anthropology(thoughcrises exist all the time and in all fields) has resulted in part from discardingthe boundariesaccepted by earlierworkersin the field, includingtheir tighterparadigms.There seems to me much truthin this claim. Anthropologyhas become diffuse in a numberof ways, which means there is room for a range of approaches.For me the way ahead is not the way back but consists in supplementing the analysis of sociocultural "facts" or situations with a problem-driven approach. That means looking for evidence where it exists ratherthan confining oneself to arbitraryboundaries, useful as these have been for specific problems or topics. I have drawnmuch satisfactionfrom working with scholarsin other fields, with historians(especially those associatedwith Past and Present, Annales E. S. C., and the CambridgeGroup), with psychologists, and with those in the neighboring fields of literatureand oriental studies. An anthropologythat does not or cannot communicate with other disciplines stands in danger of placing an excessive value on its own conclusions. It is only too easy to draw back to the safety of the communityone has studied(or even one's individual "informant" some Americantraditions),about which one may know more in than most of one's colleagues; or perhapsto seek the shelterof a hermeneutic approachto which only the writer holds the key. But knowledge exists in communicationnot only within arbitrarily defined fields (for thatis essentially what we are dealing with) but also outside them. Fields such as cognitive anthropologyseem sometimes to aim not to widen knowledge and provide a link with otherstudentsof cognitive processes but to protectand separateoff a distinctive anthropologicalpatch. Yes, we say, we anthropologistsare also interested,but in our own way and on our own terms. Thathas always seemed to me the way to ruin. There is no anthropologicaltruth, enlightenment, or even insigkht that is not related to the work of scholars in other fields. Literature Cited
1. Barth, F. 1987. Cosmologies in the

Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in the Inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2. Drucker-Brown,S. 1980. Notes towards a biography of Meyer Fortes. Am. Ethnol. 16:375-85 3. Fortes, M. 1945. TheDynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi: Being the First Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe. London: Oxford Univ. Press

4. Goody, J. 1968. Consensus and dissent in Ghana. Polit. Sci. Q. 83:337-52 5. Goody, E. N. 1973. Contexts of Kinship: An Essay in the Family Sociology of the Gonja of Northern Ghana. Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press 6. Goody, E. N. 1982. Parenthood and Social Reproduction:Fostering and Occupational Roles in West Africa. Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press 7. Goody, J. 1956. A comparative approach to incest and adultery. Br. J. Sociol. 7:286-305

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8. Goody, J. 1957. Fields of social control among the LoDagaa. J. Roy. Anthropol. Soc. 87:75-104 9. Goody, J. 1958. The fission of domestic groups among the LoDagaa. In The DevelopmentalCycle in Domestic Groups, ed. J. Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 10. Goody, J. 1959. The mother's brother and the sister's son in West Africa. J. Roy. Anthropol. Inst. 89:61-88 11. Goody, J. 1962. Death, Property and the Ancestors. Stanford:StanfordUniv. Press 12. Goody, J., ed. 1966. Succession to High Office. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 12a. Goody, J. 1971. Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Reprinted 1980, CambridgeUniv. Press 13. Goody, J. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 14. Goody, J. 1977. Production and Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 15. Goody, J. 1980. Rice-Burning and the Green Revolution in NorthernGhana. J. Dev. Stud. 16:136-55 16. Goody, J. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine, and Class. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 17. Goody, J. 1983. The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press. [7a. Goody, J. 1983. Introduction.Memorial Issue for M. Fortes. CambridgeAnthropol. 2-3 18. Goody, J. 1987. The Interface Between the Oral and the Written. Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press 19. Goody, J. 1990. The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive. Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press t0. Goody, J. 1991. The Culture of Flow-

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ers. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. In press 21. Goody, J. , Addo, N. 1977. Siblings in Ghana. Univ. GhanaPop. Stud. Vol. 7. Legon, Accra: Univ. Ghana Press 22. Goody, J. , Duly, C. 1981. Studies in the use of computersin social anthropology. Rep. to the Soc. Sci. Res. Counc., London 23. Goody, J., Goody, E. 1966. Crosscousin marriagein northern Ghana.Man 1:343-55 24. Goody, J., Goody, E. 1967. The circulation of women and childrenin norther Ghana. Man 2:226-48 25. Goody, J., Duly, C., Beeson, I., Harrison, G. 1981. On the absenceof implicit sex-preferences in Ghana. J. Biol. Sci. 13:87-96 26. Goody, J., Duly, C., Beeson, I., Harrison, G. 1981. Implicit sex preferences:a comparativestudy. J. Biol. Sci. 13:45566 27. Goody, J., Tambiah, S. J. 1973. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 28. Goody, J., Watt, I. P. 1963. The consequences of literacy. Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist. 5:304-45 29. Hart, K. 1985. The social anthropology of West Africa. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 14:243-72 30. Leach, E. R. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: Athlone Press 31. Leavis, Q. D. 1932. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto & Windus 32. Lombard, J. 1972. L'Anthropologie brittaniquecontemporaine.Paris:Press. Univers. de France 33. Watt, I. P. 1967. TheRise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press